With a seemingly endless supply of new delivery technologies, capabilities, and ad sizes, how does a marketer know which vehicle will be successful? Here’s a brief look at the state of rich media.

"The term 'rich media' may have outlived its usefulness." —Bill McCloskey, Emerging Interest

From the earliest days of Web page creation, agencies have been searching for ways to make the experience on the screen a more fulfilling one. There once was a time when blinking text was a novel approach to creating a richer content experience from a Web page; alas, IE doesn’t even support the famed <blink> tag anymore.

The evolution of “rich media” has gone from the primordial ooze of blinks and flat images to full-page dynamic takeovers and peripheral applications that enable interaction beyond the browser, and has extended past the desktop to include wireless devices that ring symphonically, take pictures, and enable video streaming. Bill McCloskey, CEO of Emerging Interest, notes that “there have been all sorts of crazy ideas under the Rich Media umbrella. Trying to sell cigars using Digiscents, the smell-o-vision of the Web, was probably the craziest.”

With the palette expanding, so too has the choice for agencies and advertisers with respect to which vehicle will deliver the most value across the pipes. Unlike most traditional media, value can equal brand awareness, registrations, clicks, replays, etc., or any combination thereof. It's no longer a simple decision of A or B, but an alphabet of vehicles, each with their own set of linguistic characteristics that provide emphasis or accents on any given marketing plan.

Rock, Paper, or Scissors?

The advertising formats are nearly as varied as the vehicles themselves:

• In-page ad vehicles (including ‘standard’, multi-panel, and expandable banners from the likes of Yahoo!, PointRoll, Klipmart and B2BWorks)
• Floating screen takeover ads (EyeBlaster, Shoshkeles, Unicast)
• The ubiquitous pop-out/up/over/under ads (with all flavors of vendors who can provide)
• Out-of-browser technologies such as ViewPoint (and Gator for that matter), which can extend the interactive experience beyond a user’s browser and onto the desktop. In the case of ViewPoint, its distribution relationship with America Online and AOL Instant Messenger offers a unique opportunity to quickly reach a community of Web users who use the Internet daily for communications
• E-mail, which in itself can be a complete interactive experience without the user ever leaving the Inbox (MindArrow, Netomat).

With a seemingly endless supply of new delivery technologies, capabilities, and ad sizes, how does a marketer know which vehicle will be successful?

For McCloskey, it’s about continuous education. “Marketers need to be convinced this works. With the layoffs at the agency level, especially in the interactive group, they do not have the time or personnel to keep up,” referring to ad agencies and marketers staying current with offerings from rich media companies. That’s why McCloskey’s company has run over 100 road shows in the past year to help educate the advertising community about the available tools in the marketplace.

David Riemer, vice president of marketing solutions at Yahoo!, agrees, noting that “we are still doing a lot of education in the marketplace about the tools available to marketers. It’s still early. But we are definitely encouraged by the level of conversations we are having with the leading marketers, including the Fortune 500. And by working directly with our rich media partners, we are able to provide marketers with the most up-to-date information about the products available and some early success stories in the marketplace. We really enjoy evangelizing rich media, because so many clients have had great experiences.”

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Of course, just as some people thought that VHS would never catch on, there are naysayers who are quick to discount the strengths of rich media. Eric Schmidt's (CEO of Google) recent comment that online advertisers should "stop scaring users" because their slower-loading formats are unwelcome by the fast-paced Internet user is one of the current red herrings in the industry. His statement assumes that interactive is a perennial dial-up medium.

From the recent comScore release, the data shows that broadband users account for 49% of all pages viewed on the Internet, and 44% of all online minutes consumed, proving that these heavier files rich media needs are not going to "scare users." Now, granted, broadband users’ being responsible for nearly half of online media consumption is not the same as them being half of all the audience online. But it does indicate just who it is that is going to be more likely than not to experience marketing messages delivered via rich media.

“On the most basic level we know that rich media garners a higher click-through than static GIF banners or plain text or HTML e-mails,” says McCloskey. “And we have the branding studies from Dynamic Logic and Millward Brown that indicate the powerful branding effects of rich media. But really we are just starting to scratch the surface. Some of the initiatives currently under development such as the multi-tracking kit from Macromedia, and some of the innovations being proposed by people at such companies as AdInterax will enable much richer data collection in the future.”

When talking about rich media, we would do well to avoid couching the benefits in terms of the increase in click-through rates. Insistence upon higher CTR as the benefit of rich media discounts the correlative relationships advertising events have with actions taken on the part of the consumer. Advertising sans CTR still has meaning.

Take, for example, the recent campaign put together by Modern Consumer, a new agency out of New York, for James Cameron’s Discovery Channel Movie, Bismarck. “Not only is the creative innovative, but it allows the capture of phone numbers so that viewers can get a personal ‘reminder’ call from James Cameron himself to remind them to watch the show,” says McCloskey. “Captivate and Capture. Those are the keys to a great rich media campaign.”

Ritesh Patel, vice president and general manager of Avenue A in New York, notes that, “We definitely see rich media as a growing trend. Today, about 90% of our clients are using rich media, and it accounts for about 20% of all the media we buy. We expect this will continue to increase in 2003.”

Haste Makes Waste

How many of you have seen Verizon’s DSL Flash ad on The New York Times Web site? Well, ads these days can not only be targeted by demographics or by audience but also by a user’s technological browser profile for those who take the time to intelligently plan a campaign and differentiate the messaging. The technology has evolved to the point at which an advertiser can know if the end user is surfing on high-speed or not. Serving an ad like this in the evening to a user who already has a high-speed Internet connection from home (just like the writers of this article) is a waste of costly inventory. Verizon has missed the opportunity to plug the other benefits of perhaps switching from a cable modem to DSL and Verizon local or national telephone service to reduce the overall household costs.

In this era of financial rationalization and responsibility, there are other measures that advertisers can take to ensure their dollars are well spent. According to a NPD survey conducted in September, 2002, over 98% of worldwide browsers could view Flash content. The implication here is that rather than creating ‘back-up’ gif or animated gif banners, which is a time-consuming process that in-house and agency interactive teams go through with most campaigns, time could be better spent creating richer assets. This in turn could lead to more effective testing and measurement of a greater number of more engaging ad units, which in turn could lead to a smarter, better, and more effective ad campaign. Publishers, advertisers, and agencies alike need to realize that small production efficiencies can lead to greater rewards for all.

Emerging Strategies

Back when New York City was young, there were several intrepid real-estate developers who decided that owning a plot of land meant more than green gardens and lily ponds. Indeed, they could substantially increase the value of their property by developing buildings with multiple floors, which allowed for more people and industry to occupy the same parcel of real-estate. With the current tools available, advertisers have the ability to apply the same techniques to their rich media ads, and in so doing enhance the advertiser’s value both to the consumer and to the site publishers.

One larger ad unit within a site where a user can elect to pull additional content without ever leaving the original site would dynamically alter the state of the user’s Web experience. No longer would she need to leave a page and go to an entirely different location, potentially becoming so engaged (or possibly lost) in other content that she would never return. Delivering required content first while also offering the opportunity to request more information without leaving the publisher’s Web site is a site owner’s dream, and the advertiser wins because they are delivering highly targeted and interactive content to an audience that has requested it in real-time.

Essentially, this would mean changing end-user perceptions about rich media advertising from interruptive to supplemental, invitational to informational (invitation = click and leave this ad, informational = click within the ad to produce more content within the ad), and passive to active (watch vs. interact).

With the recent launch of the Mercedes Ultramercial with Salon.com, we could be on the crest of a deserved shift in the value of online real-estate. Why continue to create Nascar-looking Web pages where the ads often outweigh the content and they continue to be devalued by virtue of their multiplicity?

This doesn't discount the current tactic of using full-page advertising per se (e.g. Microsoft's MSN 8.0 blitz, complete with full-page takeovers), but that's still an interruptive experience in exchange for free content. What makes the Salon situation unique is that it's offering access to ordinarily paid-for content. Already, we're seeing a shift by AOL to bring some content within its network to provide more value to paying AOL customers.

A Richer Future

The implications of greater rich media adoption and the growing ubiquity of broadband among users of the Web is a future where quality publishers lay out their sites in such a way that free-floating format ad units can stand alone in a given environment, regulating banners, buttons, and tiles to an area of a site that is more akin to direct response television advertising at 3 AM on a cable network.

Provided that advertisers demonstrate a willingness to spend at levels greater than test budgets of yore, publishers could easily clean the detritus of advertising models that have been replete with banners, buttons, and tiles; and streamline their look and feel. This will, in essence, restrict inventory. By restricting the inventory that is allotted to “Rich Media” – particularly the larger, free-floating formats such as Shoshkele, Eyeblaster, Unicast, etc. – the inventory is made more valuable. The placements thus have greater value for the advertiser (less clutter + more fetching creative = greater noticing value). This, in turn, can potentially yield greater revenues from having what is ostensibly “better” inventory.

There will no longer be a reason for a load of impressions to be carrying 120x60s. That kind of inventory can be relegated to per-inquiry pricing models and placements adequate to the cost and quality.

However true this may be, it also does create a shortage that contributes to the value of the inventory. The losses from eliminating some of the old standard units will eventually be more than made up for by selling highly desirable, limited, creatively driven advertising.

Simplifying the process by which creative goes from concept to execution will help build a richer relationship between the advertisers that use this advertising and the users who experience them. After all, a great deal of the sting that comes with attempting the use of rich media for an advertiser is the diversity of invention, the multitude of bugs each delivery system comes with, and the allocation of resource to make it all finally work. Standardizing the process will help control the options available and, in turn, lend efficiency to the systems that create them.

As Riemer says, “The key is to simplify and standardize the process by which marketers can develop rich media campaigns online, with multiple publishers. The industry is working together and there is a lot of work to be done, but we made a lot of progress in 2002 and will continue to move forward in 2003. Yahoo! has simplified the process for our customers by working directly with some of the leading rich media companies and eliminating the need for clients to negotiate with both Yahoo! and the rich media vendor to implement a campaign.”

There should be a way for publishers to compartmentalize their inventory and make up any revenues lost from replacing standard banners with the larger, better units. The convergence of better compression and other delivery technologies with larger consumer bandwidth paints an exciting picture for the future of richer, engaging online experiences. After all, not all content is created equal, nor are all audiences. This is something general market advertisers have understood for many years.

Coda

And finally, a caution about the ubiquitous use of the term “rich media” (like “CRM”) as a moniker to describe all things beyond text and images. It is like the use of the words 'traditional media'. This use of language itself creates a kind of conflict. The notion of 'traditional' when talking about agencies, or 'rich' when talking about creative assets, is a part of the problem. The industry itself is using a language of otherness that maintains a division between practices and disciplines, between and within the advertising structure. By even saying 'rich media' we set up quiet conflict. Think about it. Do you segregate your friends when you speak of them to others?

It’s time to start talking simply about advertising and its various forms. Like John Durham of Interep once stated, "Tastes great. Less filling. Either way, it's still just beer."